Last Friday, Becky, Steve and Tessa travelled down to London for the Saboteur Awards, where Haunt was shortlisted for Best Collaborative Work. We didn’t win (you can see the full list of winners here http://www.saboteurawards.org/), but we got to meet some great people, including A.B. Cooper and Sarah Miles from Paper Swans Press, and had an excellent night celebrating the health of poetry, spoken word and performance at the moment.

When we got back there was an email waiting with comments from those who had voted for Haunt. What was really striking was how everyone who commented got what Haunt is about. They understood the project, and what we’re trying to achieve.

Thank you to everyone who did vote for us, and your continued support. As Becky says in her blog post we make no apologies for sharing them here:

Haunt addresses very real issues in a new and innovative way.

A brave collaboration which aims to celebrate voices that are rarely heard whilst creating innovative work of high artistic quality.

It gives a voice to the voiceless.

Standing way above the rest with originality and great collaboration shining through the work.

Because they are great!

Brilliant project about homelessness which has produced a genuinely lovely book.

Moving, innovative project that gets to the heart of a city.

They are doing very important work in a creative, innovative way.

A wonderful fully cooperative project, raising the profile of a group of people often hidden from sight in towns like Harrogate. Gives them a voice in an original way.

The quality of the work and the depth and range of the community involvement.

Writing in the ultimate social sense.

Shockingly direct and unselfpitying accounts of people’s lives below the surface appearances of how things are meant to be.

It challenges cultural stereotypes and highlights that homelessness can be present in even the most well to do societies.

Because I grew up in Harrogate so this caught my attention and then haunted my dreams.

Innovative, forward thinking productions always, opening up debate about things that really matter. Very original way of looking at things, and opening the door to solutions.

A wonderful anthology giving a creative outlet to hidden voices and hidden talent and one that has made a real difference to the writers involved.

Innovation and fun.

Integrity.

I was particularly enthralled by Richard Harries.

Because the project allowed people who would likely otherwise be left out of arts activity to engage and get enjoyment from finding a voice.

The project has helped vulnerable people to have a voice.

For making a rather invisible subject visible through creativity and warmth. Inspiring, artistically brilliant and socially important.

Great piece on a growing issue in Yorkshire.

Managing to combine a great cause with some great stories. Giving opportunities and experience whilst raising awareness. All round a fab project.

Powerful work. Project which engaged and supported a group who really need it.

Well written and a great piece of work.

Brilliant work.

In aid of such a well deserved cause.

They’re the best collaborative work.

Excellent.

This is a beautifully haunting trip through the other side of Harrogate. The writing is powerful. It may just highlight the reality of towns and cities to the invisible people that are present there.

Just love it.

Covers an important and often neglected area of life with great sensitivity and empathy.

Very moving, on the important issue of homelessness, with participants who have been encouraged to express their real life experiences.

The book produced is great and the ongoing work of the project is raising awareness of homelessness in a town which many people wouldn’t believe has a problem.

My home town is perceived as affluent and privileged. Growing up there, I’ve often called it a schizophrenic town. In Haunt we see the other side, portrayed in a way the posh half would appreciate.

Because they are reaching out to include the excluded in society.

Intrinsic, honest, moving

They have achieved real social value as well as creative worth artistically.

amazing & evocative work

Extraordinary work tapping into the imaginations and the life experiences of some of the most marginalised people in the region.

Fantastic project, really opening people’s eyes to another side of posh Harrogate.

Because while there’s homelessness, we are all haunted, and this project is making a tangible impact.

They have done some amazing projects with the youth hostels that has been really effective

Positive work with the complex young people we support.

Amazing and moving.

Fantastic project that worked so well with our service users to produce some beautiful work

Really important project working with vulnerable people

Great project, giving people their own voice.

Having experienced homelessness and seen it’s impact first hand on many others in my hometown, this is an innovative and valuable project.

This is a genuinely collaborative project with one of the most excluded groups in society. It has led to some great art as well as opening up new opportunities for socially excluded individuals.

Because the project reminds us that homelessness and transient lives aren’t just a ‘far-away’ problem of big cities and deprived places… and, more importantly, reminds us that the homeless are real people with voices and opinions and likes and dislikes – rather than the blank receptacles for pity or charity that we’re all guilty (at times) of seeing them as.

The work they do raising awareness of the problem of homelessness, particularly in such an apparently affluent area as Harrogate where many do not realise it is happening, is amazing and important.

Because it is powerful and truly collaborative.

To encourage further collaboration between artists and venues that increase local knowledge and situational awareness. What Haunt has produced is not just a splendid piece of work, but establishes that effective, entertaining multidisciplinary approaches are eminently possibly.

Innovative, creative, inspirational.

The innovative approach to the project and the engagement with the homeless community amongst others who have collaborated on this work has been truly inspiring.

Homelessness education should be important to everyone.

Good writing and good work.

Beautiful powerful project.

The stories they are telling, in the setting they chose, and the way they are telling them.

Extraordinary work from (generally ignored) homeless people.

A sensitive collaboration between professional writers and non-professional, sometimes completely new, writers. Beautiful writing and a poignant insight into human fragility, and the fragility of our perceived ‘security’.

Very moving work about an often ignored issue.

Innovative, inclusive and local, what is not to like?

For helping those who don’t usually have a voice get their stories out there.

They are doing very important and creative work for the local community and are great poets themselves.

An important and deeply emotional project for the socially excluded.

Great collection of stories, well written.

It’s a great enterprise involving many fine Northern talents.

Compassionate and well-crafted responses to current issues of homelessness and the ways that contemporary issues can haunt us by doing as well as doing nothing, through writing and film.

For all the help and awareness they are raising. And the hard work that’s gone into the project.

Society’s staid and structured classes,
each one linked by a steel rickety bridge.
We tell our children, ‘Oh, if you only work hard,
you’ll saunter across and live the dream.’
And, whilst for the favoured few
who were born with beauty, wit or charm,
an easy crossing may be theirs,
far more common, sadly, to find
a grubby child, neglected and old before time,
stood with toe tentatively outreached
on a violently swaying hole-ridden bridge,
never to reach the other side
because of misfortune of birth
and a generation’s lies.

The sulphur turned us impish, nestling in our marrow like a hiding toddler. Staring at our faces you may have noticed small nubs of keratin erupt upon our foreheads. Behind us dragged our tails of thorns and fox tongues.

We did not inflict our mischief upon others. All our tricks were inward looking. We were both Grifter and Mark.

Our horns we hid. The girls with concealer, the boys with fringes that scraped their eyes. But our tails? Oh, we were proud of our tails. We bedecked them with ribbons and lengths of neon climbing rope. Bottle tops that caught the light, and some with bells teased from the necks of friendly cats. We dressed them like we were mingling at Carnivale, and we were proud of them. Yet they were treacherous things, our tails. Their thorns snagged three score times a day. Sometimes upon ephemeral things like a whispered word. Or the glance of those taking afternoon tea beyond a window we would never see from the other side.

Other times they caught in the route of a store detective. Shifted his footsteps until they fell in behind ours. The dance moves of the uniformed were never as rapid and staccato as those tapped out by our cloven hoofs.

On curtained days the thorns of our tails became knotted, tearing into our sheets. Became wrapped around with strands of brown and blue smoke. In the dark the fox tongues whispered words to us like blackberries. Some sweet. Some sour. We picked ourselves free with care, thread by thread.

2. Chalybeate

The chalybeate turned us ferrous, seeping into our skin like midnight thoughts. If you looked close enough at us you would see cuisse and revebrace cleave to our limbs. Plackart wrapped around our torsos. Vental covering our face when we no longer wished to talk. Yet we had no oils to care for the iron that wrapped us. No wax to rub into the once polished surface.

On our slow walks around town, feet weighed down by rusted sabaton, blisters of corrosion chipped off with each step. Our armour became shabby with each encounter. Rusted crumbs littering the well-tended grass where we lounged. Where we avoided people and homes that were not homes.

3. Magnesia

The magnesia turned us luminous, woven through our fingers like strands of radiance. No-one paid us attention, but we glowed. The midday sun at midnight. Magical and out of place. We gleamed and glittered. They ignored us. We knew this was because the brightness under our skin would scorch their eyes out. So they stepped aside and lowered their heads away from us. Glanced anywhere but in our direction.

Harrogate is known for its past as a wealthy spa town, and still has a reputation as a genteel place of tea rooms and flower shows.

This is not the Harrogate of everyone. For some people this idealised history is a haunting presence in their lives. In the fabric of buildings where they live in one room, or the parks where they sleep. Their experiences are muffled beneath the dominant voice of Harrogate.

Haunt explores how people who are homeless, or bedsit residents, live inside these ghosts of the town’s past. Haunt gives people a place to tell stories not normally heard within the accepted narrative of the town and bring them to a wider audience.